On new year’s eve I took our two and a half year old to the park. She needed to run off some energy while the baby stayed home with dad.

So there we were, me and my toddler, climbing the jungle gym as night fell. The park where we played was across the street from an event space, where people in fancy clothes were arriving for a new year’s eve party.

As I looked out at the merriment, I felt soul weary. For a moment I wanted a different life. Even after the years I spent yearning for a child of my own, I wanted to just check out of parenthood for a while.

I wanted to gather with those other grownups and wear nice clothes and stay up late. (Or more accurately, I wanted to have the option to do those things, and then choose to read in bed instead.)

On a deeper level, I wanted to be carefree, to be independent. I wanted to be all the things that one is not when one has two tiny humans in diapers in the midst of a pandemic.

What causes a weary soul?

I’m guessing you know what it’s like to feel soul weary. Here are a few of the common causes:

• Being pushed past capacity many times; lacking time and space to recharge your emotional battery
• Going through an intensely difficult season of life, including grief, loss, trauma, or betrayal
• Providing ongoing care for people with a high level of need: for example, a parent with dementia, or a child with special needs
• Dealing with a chronic health condition, or any situation where there’s exhaustion and pain, with no end in sight

Have you been through any (or all) of these? Have you ever felt like your life is falling apart? If so, you get it. You know what causes a weary soul.

And you understand the ache I felt on the playground with my kid. The ache to rest, to be held, to have someone tell me what the suffering means.

But then my girl called out to me, and I let the fantasy fall away and gave her my full attention. And soon I forgot about the party across the street, because we were having our own party.

At one point I was kneeling next to her, and she looked me in the eye and said something I didn’t understand at all.

It sounded like, “I boo-ess you.”

“I kiss you?” I asked her. (Some of her consonants, like Ks and Vs, are works in progress.)

She shook her head.

“I boo-ess you.”

And then I had it.

“Wait … I BLESS you?! Is that it, honey?”

She beamed. “I bless you!”

Then she stepped forward so her hand rested on my shoulder and upper back.
She spoke softly, yet with authority.

“I bless you. I bless you in the heart.”

She paused just long enough for me to thank her before dashing off to play again.

Soul weary meaning and message

I’ve never forgotten that moment of grace, and what my little one taught me. Here’s what I understand now, thanks to her unexpected blessing.

Lots of us are so afraid that when we live our truth, we’ll lose people. We’re scared that others will see the secret we’ve been keeping: that we’re actually awful. That we are not so kind or generous or good after all.

This is one side of the story, yes. Sometimes living our truth means taking off the mask of “maturity” (read: numbness) and being angrier and sadder than we’ve ever been.

This is terrifying, because what if those pesky feelings of ours mess everything up? And they very well might. Some things might fall apart and fall away.

But there’s another side of the story.

See, when we show up in integrity, when we live our truth, we bless everyone around us. When we offer them our wholehearted selves – like little kids do – we bless others for real.

We bless them in the heart.

What is a weary spirit, really?

So you see, having a weary spirit isn’t just about fatigue, though that certainly plays a role. Rather, it’s about losing hope. This may or may not be visible on the outside.

Sure, some people lose hope and then can’t get out of bed in the morning. (If that’s you, please get help now. Search “depression hotline” for immediate support via phone or text.)

But more often than not, losing hope is a quiet process. When clients come to me for coaching, their lives often look fine on the outside. They move through their daily schedules with what I call “high functioning hopelessness.”

They’re showing up as capable at work, completing tasks and checking boxes. But deep down, they don’t believe they have the power to effect positive change in their own lives.

Inadvertently, they’ve been lying to themselves.

What is a weary spirit? Here’s my unconventional definition: It’s a spirit that has been subjected to lies for a long time. Lies like, “You can’t quit,” or, “You’re not good enough,” or, “Your dreams are too big for you.”

Healing a weary spirit goes beyond rest (though, if you want to find your purpose, I highly recommend a day or two of radical rest). On a deeper level, recovering from soul weariness requires a return to wholeness, oneness, and integrity.

How to heal when you’re soul weary

Here’s the tricky part, though. We don’t always know where we’re out of integrity! We take for granted that we’re supposed to rise above and be “better” rather than being honest about how we really feel.

In a nutshell: The most direct way I’ve found to heal from soul weariness is to stop working so hard at being good and rest in being real.

My favorite coach, Dr. Martha Beck, puts it this way.

“You don’t leave [integrity] because you’re bad. You leave it because you’re trying to be good.”

Let me tell you a story about a time when I did exactly that, so you can see what it looks like in real time.

–

“Build a puppy house,” my toddler says to me, and I hesitate. It’s almost her bedtime, and I sense that this will end in tears.

“Build a puppy house!” she cries again. She clutches her stuffed puppy – the one I picked out last Christmas – and gives me her best Bambi eyes.

I prompt her to say “please,” but we both know: I’m giving in. Much of my time and attention has been redirected to her new baby sister, and I feel guilty about this.

And so we sit in the midst of our cardboard “bricks” on the rug. I was up in the middle of the night with the baby, and now I am so very tired. Nevertheless, I am trying.

In the process I am forgetting what I know, which is that martyrdom isn’t what my girl needs from me. She does not need me to kill myself to appease her whims; rather, she needs to see me take care of myself, even as I take care of her.

But alas, I have forgotten. For this little girl I love beyond words, I am pushing myself past capacity. And it’s not enough.

“No! No! NO!” she says, her face falling, her voice tipping into a whine. The same puppy house that brought her joy when we built it this morning is a travesty this evening.

Taking a deep breath, I say, “I hear you, honey. What would you like? How can I help?”

She can’t answer me. I see frustration in her face. At age two, she’s putting together some impressive sentences. But she can’t tell me what she wants just now, and I can’t read her mind.

No matter what I try, it’s: “No! Not RIGHT!”

This scenario presses on old pain points. The quickest way to make me feel crazy has always been to tell me I’ve done something wrong and then not allow me to fix it.

All at once I am furious. I start a silent tantrum: Seriously? I am building the damn puppy house! I am trying to give her what she wants, when I don’t even have what I need! I hate this!

–

The next day, I tell my closest friends about how the puppy house that worked in the morning didn’t work in the evening, and how crazy I felt. I tell them that I kept my temper, but barely.

And then one of my friends says: “Well, you could put the bricks away at night.”

I start laughing. Of course we could put the bricks away at night! It’s obvious! And yet, this never occurred to me. (And I’m a coach who helps people trade perfectionism for possibility!) Not for one second did I think: We could opt out of building at bedtime.

The thing is, when you’re addicted to something, you think it’s the solution to every problem. When you’re addicted to alcohol, drinks are your default. And when you’re addicted to proving yourself, “try harder” is your go-to.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way?

Pause here and ponder: What are your “bricks” – the things in your daily routine that sap your strength and will to live? And how might you lighten that load?

That said: Seeing new possibilities is only half the equation.
The other half is giving yourself permission to take action. To actually do less, not just talk about it.

And for those of us who hustle for worthiness, this feels terrifying. It opens up this vast canyon of big feelings and fear.

–

I’ve wrestled with overwork for most of my life.

It’s a persistent pattern, resisting myriad attempts at change. I’ve inadvertently re-created overload in different environments: at school, at work, in parenting. In DC, and in Alabama. (In a car, on a train, in a house, with a mouse …)

There have been times when I’ve purposefully used overwork to hurt myself. (I talk more about that in my book, You Don’t Owe Anyone). Yet even though I don’t do that anymore, I still tend to pile on additional responsibilities. I still find it hard to un-commit, even for good reasons.

When a coaching client comes to me with a problem like this – an issue that persists despite repeated, well-meaning attempts at change – then I know that we’re dealing with an emotional-level issue.

For example, listen as I coach a reader whose fear and soul weariness were stopping her from deciding on her next career move.

 

And when I coached myself to look closely at what was causing my own overwork, it brought me to this early memory.

–

I am sitting at the kitchen table with my children’s church lesson booklet before me. Usually I’m diligent about completing the booklet before church each week. Just like my elementary school homework, it always gets done.

But today, something is different. Today, I’m so very tired. (Have I been sick, or am I just exhausted?)

Either way, I ask if it’s okay, just this once, not to finish. The answer I get is No, Caroline. You need to do the lesson now.

And so I obey. I take out my markers to color the illustrations in the book. I color the feathers of those birds, the curve of Noah’s ark. And I understand that no matter how I feel, there can be no exceptions to the rules.

I am praised for doing well, but I feel … angry. For the first time in my young life, I don’t want to be told that I’ve done a good job. I want to have not had to do the job at all.

The next day, I bring my lesson book to church. Our teacher checks it. But my friend Eva hasn’t completed her lesson, and the teacher simply asks her to finish it for next week. No drama, no guilt, just a free pass.

And I feel a shot of longing, powerful as a punch to the stomach. Why does Eva get more time? Why is it okay for her not to finish her work? Why not me?

It’s like that Bible verse: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” In this moment, I want mercy so much.

Then I feel bad for feeling that way, so I push the whole incident down and away. I don’t think about it again for twenty-five years.

–

Of course, it wasn’t just that one time. That memory is representative; it symbolizes an entire religious and cultural message that I “heard” a thousand times: “It doesn’t matter how bad you feel; just get the job done.”

And for so long, I lived by that principle. But this year, it broke down in earnest.

This year, I parented a toddler while pregnant while healing from big-time trauma while running my own coaching business while contracting as a coach for another business while launching a book (and recording an audiobook) in the middle of a pandemic.

Granted, I am fortunate to do work I love, with wonderful people, and that buoyed me. But then I had the baby. And in the three months surrounding the birth, we withstood three major medical crises in my immediate family.

Needless to say, I got to a point where I could no longer work my way out. I wasn’t sleeping enough to feel stable, and I spiraled. It wasn’t dramatic on the outside, but inside, I knew I was in trouble.

Thankfully I got help, and I’m feeling better now. But when my old try-hard strategy failed, it felt like the end of the line.

–

When I reconnected with my younger self – the one who asked to postpone her children’s church assignment – I asked her, “What do you need to feel safe and loved?”

The answer was simple: She needed reassurance that it was okay to leave some tasks undone, sometimes. She needed to know that the rules were different now.

Most of all, she needed to know that I loved her if she was a human being instead of a productivity machine.

She needed mercy from me, right here and now.

With my eyes closed, I imagined holding her the way I hold my babies. I told her that she mattered more than any church lesson book. (I believe my actual words were, “Oh honey, I couldn’t care less about that stupid lesson.”)

We laughed and then we cried, because that’s what you do when you reconnect to the self that you’ve given up for lost.

–

As I prepared to return from maternity leave this summer, I had a choice to make.

Would I continue the old way, taking up a heavy workload while pushing aside my needs and feelings? Or would I be merciful to myself, and do much less than felt “right”?

That’s the thing about breaking a longstanding pattern – to your trained mind, it feels taboo. The trick is to listen to your body, heart, and spirit.

Does your choice feel freeing? Does it feel liberating, even as it scares the living daylights out of you? Then you can trust that.

So that’s what I did. I decided that I would do less than I thought I could, and much less than I thought I should. I decided that for this specific season, I would press pause on many of my usual activities.

I would not start a new book or a new interview series, much as I loved working on those projects. I would not resume my long-term coaching gig, much as I loved working with those people.

Instead, I would focus on just three things: healing my body, taking care of my kids, and serving my existing coaching clients. Nothing more.

It’s less than I’m capable of, sure. But that’s not a point worth proving anymore.

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